After the open landscapes around Dreiborn and the monumental National Socialist Ordensburg Vogelsang, Monschau felt completely different. Here everything is compressed into the narrow valley of the River Rur: steep hills rise almost immediately behind the houses, streets squeeze between the water and the slopes, and the old town contains an unusually dense collection of slate roofs, timber-framed buildings and former cloth merchants’ houses.
Monschau is often presented simply as one of Germany’s prettiest small towns, but that description leaves out the reason it looks the way it does. The old centre is not merely a collection of preserved medieval houses. Much of its character comes from the enormous wealth generated by the textile industry during the seventeenth and especially the eighteenth centuries.
The town itself is older.
Its history is closely connected with Monschau Castle, built by the Dukes of Limburg on a spur above the River Rur during the final decade of the twelfth century. The settlement appears in written records in 1198 as Mons Ioci and subsequently under several spellings including Munioie, Monjoye and Montjoie.
Even the modern name has a political history.
For centuries forms resembling Monjoye or Montjoie were normal. During the period of French rule in the Rhineland around 1800, Montjoie became particularly established. Only in 1918, at the end of the First World War and during a period of strong anti-French sentiment in Germany, was the name officially changed to the more German-looking Monschau.
The castle above the town was originally a strategic centre rather than a picturesque viewpoint. The Lords of Monschau controlled the surrounding territory during the Middle Ages, and after a complicated series of inheritances the lordship eventually became part of the Duchy of Jülich in 1435.
The narrow valley below the castle then developed an economy that would transform the town far more dramatically than medieval politics had done.
That economy was cloth.
The wider Monschau region had suitable conditions for textile production: water was available for processing wool, while the surrounding countryside supplied labour. Cloth manufacture initially developed around nearby Imgenbroich and gradually became concentrated in Monschau itself.
By the seventeenth century, cloth production was already important. During the eighteenth century it made several Monschau families extremely wealthy.
These were not small workshops producing only for local customers. High-quality Monschau cloth was traded internationally.
The finest period came during the second half of the eighteenth century, when production increasingly moved away from the older putting-out system, in which separate stages of work were carried out in different homes, towards larger operations in which several stages of manufacture were concentrated in the same building.
That development explains some of the unusually substantial houses in the centre.
The best example is the Rotes Haus, or Red House.
The Rotes Haus was constructed around 1760 for Johann Heinrich Scheibler, one of Monschau’s most successful cloth manufacturers and merchants. It was simultaneously a family residence and a place of business.
Its size alone gives some idea of the wealth generated by the textile trade, but the interior is even more revealing. Original furnishings survive in Rococo, Louis XVI and Empire styles, together with business rooms connected with the cloth company.
The most famous feature is an extraordinary self-supporting oak staircase extending over three floors. Twenty-one carved scenes show different stages of cloth production, effectively turning the staircase into a record of the industry that paid for the house.
Two preserved cloth sample books contain around 6,000 designs, showing just how sophisticated the business had become and how far Monschau was from being a small isolated craft town.
The surrounding streets preserve the other side of the same story.
Timber-framed houses stand immediately beside larger manufacturers’ residences and former industrial buildings. The River Rur runs through the centre because water was not merely decorative: it was part of the industrial system.
The town’s geography also limited expansion.
Monschau sits in such a narrow valley that there was relatively little space for the sort of enormous nineteenth-century industrial development that transformed many other German towns. That eventually became an economic disadvantage, but it is one reason the old centre survived so well.
The French Revolutionary Army entered Monschau in 1794.
French rule initially damaged the local cloth trade because property was confiscated and some traditional markets were lost. At the same time, the surviving textile businesses began to mechanise.
Then the political situation changed again after Napoleon’s defeat. Under the decisions of the Congress of Vienna, Monschau became part of Prussia in 1816.
The textile industry never fully recovered its eighteenth-century position.
Other industrial centres were becoming larger, more mechanised and better connected. Some Monschau entrepreneurs moved their activities eastwards to industrial cities such as Łódź and Brno, while others changed to different types of textile production.
The population shows how serious the decline became. Monschau had about 3,020 inhabitants in 1816 but only around 1,865 by 1905.
The opening of the Vennbahn railway from Aachen in 1885 improved transport and encouraged tourism, but it could not restore the old cloth industry. The last cloth factory closed in 1908, although other textile-related activities continued for several more decades.
What looked like an economic weakness eventually helped create the Monschau visitors see today.
The valley did not become heavily industrialised or rebuilt on a large scale. The old merchant houses, narrow streets and timber-framed buildings remained.
Monschau Castle survived too, although it came close to becoming a ruin before restoration. Today the castle dominates the old town from above and is much more visible as part of the landscape than as a military structure.
The River Rur remains the other constant.
It cuts directly through the centre, sometimes only a few metres from the houses, crossed repeatedly by small bridges. The combination of water, steep wooded slopes and buildings pressed into the valley makes Monschau look unusually compact even by Eifel standards.
That geography also explains why visiting Monschau with a motorhome is different from visiting many ordinary small German towns. The historic centre was never designed for modern traffic, and there is simply very little unused space inside the valley. Monschau is therefore a place where leaving the vehicle outside the tightest streets makes considerably more sense than trying to force a large motorhome into the centre.
For us, Monschau also made an interesting contrast with the previous stops.
Around Dreiborn, much of the important history is spread across the landscape: the Eifel National Park, the former military training area, the abandoned village of Wollseifen and the National Socialist Ordensburg Vogelsang.
Monschau concentrates its history almost on top of itself.
A medieval castle stands above an eighteenth-century industrial town; merchants’ houses sit beside timber-framed homes; the river that helped power the textile economy now runs through one of the most visited historic centres in the Eifel.
It looks preserved because it is attractive.
In reality, it was preserved partly because the industry that made it rich eventually moved somewhere else.